Shining Hope for Communities

VisionBuilding urban promise from urban poverty.SHOFCO works towards a future where all individuals in urban communities have the chance to realize their full potential and thrive, turning urban poverty into promise.

HistorySHOFCO’s primary teaching is grounded on the emphasis of high-performing leadership skills, equipping students with the tools to become advocates for positive change.

Main programs

Service Delivery in three areas:

Healthcare: SHOFCO provides low cost, high-quality medical care through the provision of primary health and preventative care, comprehensive HIV care, cervical cancer screening, family planning, and maternal and child healthcare. With improved access to reliable medical treatment, infants and children will have a higher chance of normal neurocognitive development and increased years of schooling, and adults will experience decreased missed wages due to illness.

Water and Sanitation: SHOFCO hasbuiltclean water distribution centers throughout Kibera,providing access to clean, affordable waterand mitigating the health risks directly associated withwater-borne illnesses due to contaminated water supplies.

Community advocacy: SHOFCO’s approach to service delivery does not merely address immediate inequities, but enables individuals to participate in long-term change. Through the use of our services, we build an organizing mechanism that facilitates large-scale grassroots advocacy efforts. This unified platform, known as the SHOFCO Urban Network (SUN) brings together individuals and households using our services and organizes them to actively seek tangible change in their community and society at large.

Female leaders of Tomorrow: Change will only be achieved and sustained if all stakeholders value an inclusive democracy and tomorrow’s leaders create and enforce just policies. Therefore, we make long-term investments in quality education for girls living in slum communities, as they understand the complexities of poverty, and have the innate incentive to instill change.

Short term vision (2017-2020): SHOFCO will broaden its focus to cities as a whole rather than individual slums in order to achieve the level of change necessary for sustained transformation. SHOFCO will be expanding its services to additional informal settlements in Nairobi and Mombasa, Kenya. In each new site, SHOFCO will replicate its holistic suite of social services connected to a Girls’ Education Center, with one central Girls' Leadership Academy per city that students from all slums can attend. The Girls’ Education Centers will become hubs to reach more girls, as well as maintain our link to girls’ education in the center of social services.